Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Jessie’s twin sister, Allison, explained further. “We’re figuring out the numbers. We have four members so far and we’re trying to pick one more member without hurting anyone’s feelings. We don’t want it to be too big, because then it won’t be as much fun.”

  “The whole process has been very complicated,” their mother said. “Since they thought up the idea a few weeks ago, they’ve been on the phone every afternoon, planning activities, selecting dates, and going through an elaborate decision-making process about the other members.”

  “I wanted Sarah, and Ellie wanted Sarah, but Allison wanted Perry,” says Jessie. “If we had Sarah, though, then Cynthia might have gotten mad, because Sarah and Cynthia are best friends. And if we had Perry, then Ellie and I would be mad, because we think Perry’s too bossy.”

  Mrs. Streeter has been amused but also impressed by the process. “We’ve had some good conversations about including people, about compromise, and about people’s feelings.”

  Like the Streeter twins and their friends, many girls are as comfortable talking about and negotiating the process of games as they are playing them. They seem to focus less on the outcome than on who gets to participate and on how that affects the other girls.

  Of course, the play of boys and girls does not always fall into neat categories. We are all familiar with boys who shy away from rough-and-tumble play and girls who love getting revved up for a fierce game of basketball, soccer, hockey, or another competitive sport. There are plenty of girls with an ample sense of competition and plenty of boys who care immensely about being well liked and included in the central play group. Recognizing general gender differences in play styles is important, however, because these differences may contribute to our misconceptions about their friendships.

  For when it comes to boys, it is often through their rowdy play that they build friendships. Underneath the rough-and-tumble games where boys are seeking to feel part of the action and striving for excellence in the company of their buddies, they are building relationships. Harry Stack Sullivan recognized the importance to boys of these close “chumships.” He described boys’ friendships as a form of “love.” Through these “love” affairs, he said, boys are able to develop a more accurate self-image and a stronger sense of personal worth and enhanced self-esteem.

  INTIMACY FOR BOYS AND INTIMACY FOR GIRLS

  Integral to genuine friendships is intimacy. As we have seen, boys achieve significant intimacy in their relationships with other boys, although they often experience it differently than girls. Because of societal taboos that discourage open displays of caring between boys, their intimate connections get pushed underground. The intimacy occurs quietly, privately, almost invisibly. Researcher Scott Swain has defined men’s style of intimacy as “covert intimacy,” an intimacy that is expressed unobtrusively and silently.

  When a boy’s best friend is leaving town for the summer, he is more likely to offer a good-bye hug to his pal when no one else is around. When a quarterback makes a great pass to clinch the game, his teammates are more likely to give him a quick pat on the back or offer succinct words of praise such as “Great pass” or “Nice going” than to tell him how proud they are of him. To help us understand boys’ brand of intimacy, Swain talks about “behavior in the context of a friendship that connotes a positive and mutual sense of meaning and importance to the participants.” In other words, intimacy encompasses whatever behaviors make people feel close to one another.

  It is important to support boys in experiencing these moments of connection with one another. I encourage parents to gently reinforce them. Fathers can tell stories about their own buddies. Mothers can share their own special friendships—with girls or with boys—from childhood. Parents can reinforce behavior by telling a boy, “That was really nice the way you complimented Bobby on his great pass” or “What a great idea to invite Hal over for dinner—he must be glad to have your friendship now that his dad’s moved out.” Without embarrassing him, we let him know that boy-boy bonding is valuable and that the intimacy he’s able to achieve is not only appropriate, but commendable.

  BOYS DO TALK

  One of the most surprising findings from my interviews was how much these allegedly nonverbal boys were talking. In fact, according to some of these boys, they rival their sisters in phone usage.

  Guy told us he talks to Conor, his best friend, at least twice a day. “When I get home from school and before I go to sleep. And then in the morning, he picks me up for school and he calls me from the car before he gets here. Yeah, we talk a lot.” These boys process everything with the intensity of any two girls. “We talk about everything: sports, girls, school, our parents. We’re a lot alike so he can sort of look through my eyes in a situation.”

  Sixteen-year-old Ed says humor and conversation are what bind his friendship with Jamal. “We think exactly the same and we really make each other laugh a lot. I think that he’s probably the funniest kid I know and he thinks I’m the funniest kid he knows. Talking to him is so easy. I know I can call him and talk to him about pretty much anything. Sometimes I just want to talk about nothing—just joke and laugh—and sometimes I have something I really need to ask him about: what should I do and what do you think about that? There are certain things that you don’t want to talk about with just anybody and it’s good to be able to talk to him.”

  Once again, however, there is a covert aspect to these conversations. Ed talks to Jamal about things he can’t tell anyone else. Guy and Conor talk in the privacy of their homes. No one is aware of the extent to which these boys process their feelings together—except perhaps, the phone company and the parents who pay the phone bill.

  At times some boys may expect different things from their conversations than girls do. In particular, they may express their natural empathy in a different manner. When boys are sad, they often expect a friend to try to talk to them and cheer them up. “I always have people around to cheer me up, so I don’t get down that often. When things go wrong, I talk to my friends and get it off my chest,” says fifteen-year-old Curtis.

  As Shawn puts it, “When my friends are feeling down, I try to talk to them, bring their spirits up a bit because I know how much it helps me. There is nothing worse than feeling sad or frustrated and having no one to talk to.”

  Yet when boys are feeling down they don’t always expect their friends to lend a sympathetic ear. Quite the opposite, boys sometimes tease and insult one another when emotions are running highest. When Paul was going through a hard time, he turned to Tim. “We usually end up dealing with our problems in a comical way,” says Paul. “We always end up making light of it. It’s easier to handle.”

  Jeremy tells how Brett goofs on him to cheer him up. “One day I was in a really bad mood. I had totaled my car that morning and I was an hour late. Brett was egging me on. Teasing me about stuff. It had nothing to do with the car. I took my shoes off and a moment later my shoes were gone. I was getting pissed and I would go, ‘Just give them to me.’ But he kept it up and I finally ending up laughing and punching him.”

  Indeed boys may also expect contradiction from their close buddies. Contradiction may enhance their friend’s capacity for perspective on emotionally charged issues. As Tony explained: “I think it’s important [to talk]. . . . Oh, I think it’s helpful because it’s definitely good to see their perspective on things and it helps to know if they disagree . . . it kind of makes you want to rethink your decision, and that’s very helpful.”

  Boys may avoid direct expressions of sympathy. The “Oh, you poor thing” approach is heard by some boys as condescending, as implying a deficiency in the boy in trouble. And, while it might be all right to admit a weakness to a very close friend, it’s not something most shame-sensitive boys dwell on. Boys may far prefer a friend saying, “What a jerk,” or “No way! That’s ridiculous!” or “That sucks! Now, let’s go play ball” to “How can I make you feel better?” or “How are you going to get through this?”

/>   And when boys are confused or upset, they may prefer direct advice. Jeremy says he turns to Brett for advice when he has problems. “I can tell him anything because it’s almost like he’s going through it too. There are a lot of situations that I can talk to him about and he gives me an honest answer. I know in all seriousness that he would give me the best advice he could.”

  BIASES AND BLIND SPOTS: OTHER REASONS

  WE DON’T VALUE BOYS’ FRIENDSHIPS

  As we saw earlier, our difficulty in valuing boys’ friendships stems, in part, from unwitting biases and blind spots. Researchers of child behavior are certainly not immune to these influences. On the whole, many researchers have missed the importance of boys’ relationships because they too have applied what they’ve known about girls’ relationships or adult female friendships as a benchmark to understand relationships among boys. Unfortunately, when researchers misunderstand boys’ behavior, we as a society are often led to adopt the same misguided viewpoints.

  To get a sense of how highly sophisticated researchers distort our view of boys, let’s consider the work of noted psychologist Eleanor Maccoby, who in one widely cited 1990 review study examines the differences in conversational style between boys and girls. In this study Maccoby concludes that a boy tends to use speech to serve egoistic functions, such as to establish and protect his turf. Among girls, she says, conversation is a more socially binding process, used to create feelings of connectedness rather than rivalry.

  She labels boys’ speech patterns as restrictive, a style that tends to derail an interaction. “Examples are threatening a partner, directly contradicting or interrupting, topping the partner’s story, boasting or engaging in other forms of self-display,” she writes. In contrast, she calls girls’ speech patterns enabling, which means that, by “acknowledging another’s comments or expressing agreement,” girls tend to extend the conversation. She concludes: “I want to suggest that it is because women and girls use more enabling styles that they are able to form more intimate and more integrated relationships. Also I think it likely that it is the male concern for turf and dominance—that is, with not showing weakness to other men and boys—that underlies their restrictive interaction style and their lack of self-disclosure.”

  Clearly Maccoby’s statements are based on broad assumptions. She says that the girls’ enabling speech style keeps conversations going longer and therefore leads to greater intimacy. This view makes the assumptive leap that conversation equals intimacy. As we have seen, intimacy can arise from any shared activities that bring people closer together. Intimacy can be born of a “doing together” in which caring or empathy finds expression. Maccoby also assumes that behaviors such as “contradicting” or “topping the story” of the speaker will necessarily limit an interaction. However, for boys perhaps more accustomed to teasing, I believe that contradiction can in fact prolong a good-spirited argument. Topping another’s story can be an invitation for continued storytelling.

  Other researchers are equally quick to judge little girls as relational experts and little boys as lagging far behind. Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand, asked second-grade girls and boys to talk about “something serious.” The girls told stories about accidents and illnesses that have hurt people they care about. The boys, however, couldn’t seem to settle down and bring themselves to do any “serious” talk. They ran around the room, telling scatological jokes, searching for games to play, for “something to do,” and taunted or teased each other. Tannen interprets what happened as showing girls’ natural ability to be in relationships and boys’ greater need for status, independence, and action, which gets in the way of relationships.

  Boys are so competitive with each other, Tannen and Maccoby seem to believe, so concerned with one-upmanship and activity that they ride

  roughshod over one another’s feelings and lose the ability to connect with one another in any meaningful way.

  If we understand the developmental path of boys, we view these behaviors differently. For instance, I would suggest that the boys in Tannen’s study are less Machievellian princes, concerned with power and dominance, than they are our own “real boys.” They are boys trying to make friends, be accepted by the group, and avoid rejection or humiliation. If we shift our focus from friendship to what psychologists call “pro-social activity”—that is, doing something positive with or for a friend—we discover that these boys are in fact in the early stages of what I’ve called “doing together,” or what psychologist Ronald Levant has referred to in adult men as a form of “action empathy.”

  A boy knows that were he to sit down and talk about his disappointing grades, his mother’s illness, or his lonely weekends, he would be breaking the Boy Code, the code of masculinity. Responding to the researcher’s demands to talk seriously may bring him shame and humiliation. Why would any boy let down his protective macho mask in front of a researcher he hardly knows and whom he likely doesn’t trust? What most boys probably do instead is energetically not comply. The boys’ rebellious outbursts and foul language may well reflect the tensions of an impossible assignment.

  In fact, much of the boys’ group behaviors that were observed likely stemmed from this sort of compensatory response. Boys learn they have to put on an act to get by, to wear a tough-guy mask to avoid being teased. “When someone teases you, you learn you can’t back down,” says Shawn. “You have to step up and show you’re even tougher than he is.”

  Why is action empathy any less deep and meaningful than the verbally intimate moments shared among girls and young women? Why should John and Hal, shirtless, bending over John’s motorcycle, attempting to adjust the throttle while intermittently slapping each other on the back and spraying water on each other’s heads be projecting a model of friendship any less meaningful than Amy and Ellen working out together at the all women’s gym and discussing Andrea’s difficulty telling her new boyfriend that she’s not yet ready for sex?

  So it seems boys may follow their own formula for friendship: start with action and energy, throw in loyalty, laughter, and “doing together.” Add covert verbal expressions of caring, earnestness, and hidden physical touching—and you get a good friend. This formula may differ completely from that for a girl’s friendship, but it may be no less real or intimate.

  My most striking personal encounter with a researcher’s blind spots toward boy friendships occurred when I saw the movie Stand by Me. I went to this movie with a female researcher. In the literature of books and motion pictures that explore friendships among boys, this 1986 film, in my estimation, is one of the more genuine and realistic works. Four boys embark on an adventure to find the body of a missing boy. The boys face external dangers as well as internal ones. They talk about the death of a brother, a teacher’s betrayal, and their fears for the future. They comfort each other, protect each other, and end up closer than ever.

  The woman colleague with whom I viewed this film was startled, and somewhat repelled, by the boys’ friendships in the movie. She was amazed at the way these self-described best friends addressed one another with insults and taunts. (Granted, I too was impressed by the number and variety of derogatory names that these boys threw at one another.) However, she was particularly struck by the line “Finding new and preferably disgusting ways to degrade one’s mother was always held in high regard.” She was further aghast at how often these so-called best friends physically insulted each other by dunking each other in a muddy swamp, putting each other in head holds, or displaying a wide repertoire of playful slaps, kicks, and punches. In short, she seemed to feel that this movie, with these boys, was the predecessor of Lord of the Flies.

  I didn’t argue with her. But the very behaviors that repelled her about the boys were also what made the movie a realistic depiction of how many a twelve-year-old interacts. I saw their interactions in a completely different light. I came away with a warm feeling for the friendship between these boys. Judging from the last line of the movie—“I never had
friends like the ones I had when I was twelve”—the writer clearly felt this as well. I was moved by the support these boys gave one another and the warmth that existed between them. The name-calling, insults, and physical rough-housing were part of the way they expressed their feelings for one another—in “action mode.” I saw affection underneath the physicality.

  We have to take the friendships between boys—and the intimacy they provide—on their own merit. Boys won’t usually walk arm in arm or say, “I love you,” but they have found compensatory strategies that work for them and are understood by them. Certainly, we must try to understand them too.

  As stated earlier, perhaps one of the most stubborn blind spots obstructing our view of boys’ friendships is society’s tendency to see boys as essentially “toxic” or dangerous. As a result, some parents worry about the possibly pernicious influence of other boys on their sons instead of seeing boys’ friendships as constructive, healing influences. Parents fret when their boy learns his first swear words or first karate kicks in elementary school. When he becomes an adolescent, they worry that older boys will pressure him to take drugs, have sex, drive drunk, dive off a quarry cliff, lie down on railroad tracks, or engage in the other incredibly risky behaviors that we tend to associate with teenage boys. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to regard any group of boys over the age of ten as a “gang”—as antisocial until proven otherwise.

  While a few boys do get in with the wrong crowd, Thomas Berndt, of Purdue University, found that, overall, boys exert a healthy, positive influence on one another. Berndt concluded that boys with healthy friendships are actually less likely to engage in risky behaviors and more likely to do well in school. Boys actually protect one another through their friendships.